Today, Creative Virtual released the results of Creative Virtual’s 2013 Global Customer Service Outlook Survey fielded between April and May of this year. We’re happy to report that customer experience management is at the top of respondents’ lists across the globe. We’re really excited that global organisations are equally concerned with the state of customer service, and have similar views on how to enhance and grow the customer experience. It’s certainly a growing trend among global enterprises that are struggling to create seamless interactions across all customer touch points to provide information and convenience for their end user.

While customer experience management was the top concern, we also asked respondents to rate their top goals for 2013. EMEA and North America, had similar responses with only slight variations. For instance, 68% of respondents in EMEA and 79% of respondents in North America rated customer experience as a top goal followed by their need to resolve customer inquiries faster and a strong #2 goal. Increasing usage of self-service tools and customer engagement made the top 5, but where they differ is EMEA’s stronger desire to reduce call and chat volumes to live agents and North America’s desire to obtain better customer satisfaction data. (see charts below)

We also asked respondents to tell us how they would support these goals when it came to budget. In EMEA, 38% said they would maintain the same customer support budget from 2012 to 2013 while 30% planned to increase it. In North America, 44% said they wouldn’t increase or decrease their budget from 2012 while 29% planned to increase their customer support budgets in 2013. (see charts below)

In the survey, we also delved into usage of customer support channels and tools as well as contact volumes by channel. What’s really interesting about these results is that it gives you an inside view of how customer service professionals (who made up the bulk of the respondents) view their customer landscape and how they planned to navigate in the current year.